Men and women don't shop alike -- duh.

Yes, I know it's well-known that women and men have different attitudes toward shopping. In a nutshell, women browse, looking for whatever might be useful and may be on sale, while men park the car and dart into a store, and if what we're trying to buy isn't available, dart back out again and drive away.

It recently came home to me -- again -- when we had a snow storm that made my wife reluctant to take her car out on the slippery city streets. I said I would take her to a nearby discount store not to be named -- okay, it was Target -- and would pick her up again in an hour.

My first tip-off should have been when she said, "It may take me more than an hour." I went home and did chores and wrote a first draft of my auto-biography, etc. After two hours, I called her cell phone. No, she wasn't done shopping yet. I re-arranged the garage and called her back another hour later: "No, not yet." I was thinking: You're not in New York or San Francisco -- you're at Target! Eventually she called to say she was done and came home with all kinds of things I wouldn't have thought to buy for us and for others.

I hate to fall back on cliches, but I do think men are hunters and women are gatherers. When men go out to hunt -- or shop -- they know what they're after. In modern times, it might be a down vest or a particular knife or a softball glove. If the store doesn't have it, we're gone. In more primitive times, it might be an elk or a moose or a seal or a big fish (if we're fishermen) or a mammoth. If we kill it, we bring it home and cut it up and live for another winter. If we don't kill anything, then we'd better hope the women we left behind with our offspring managed to gather some potatoes or something to get us by for a while. Men don't tend to have a Plan B.

Here's one apocalyptic scenario: the men go out to hunt for meat and all freeze to death in the snow of a new Ice Age, while the women and kids survive in their cave on a diet of root vegetables (that the men never liked) and maybe some weeds sauteed with wild garlic.

A new day dawns as the ice retreats, and what man is left to help re-populate? Not the macho man who froze in the snow but the new man -- the New Ice Age Man -- who was smart enough to plead some kind of disability and be left behind to learn the ways of the women.

They could probably teach him a few things about sex, too, if he was willing to listen.

Going back to how I started this essay, a man and a woman could walk through the same store, one they both agreed to go into, and the man would come away, within a half hour, saying that he was bored and would be waiting in a nearby pub, while the woman might say that she needed a few more hours.

When women go out to shop, it's to find whatever is on sale and what might serve the family, or herself, best. Men shop the same way they hunt in the wild: they will walk right past a squirrel or marmot that could make a good meal and that would be easy pickings for supper but that aren't what they went out to hunt. I think it's possible that men hunting elk have starved to death in the snows of Colorado because they passed up the chance to shoot small game who were skittering around their ankles all the time they were sighting through scopes at non-existent big animals.

Men, being single-minded, depend on women so much more than they realize.

The only reason women don't rule the world is that some perverse god made them weaker, on the whole. What kind of god would separate the brains from the brawn by gender? Ours, apparently. Some girls can kick my ass, granted, but most are created not quite as strong as men. And, besides, men have that testosterone, which drives them to great athletic achievements but also off cliffs and into oncoming traffic. It also makes them abuse women.

In our modern time, a woman might find that elusive place setting or a special gift for a child and buy it, thinking ahead to not just Chistmas but also birthdays, etc. A woman let loose in a big store like Target might find all kinds of bargains that wouldn't even register on a man's brain. Get that elk or don't; time to go home. Women linger behind, looking for bargains, small game.

And that's how the species survives. Men try to bring home the meat, while women do the heavy lifting of vegetables and kids' schedules and all that. But sometimes -- now, not then -- it shifts into reverse, and it's the women bringing home the meat, the men cooking it. In either case, one of us is the hunter, the other -- at home -- the gatherer, and no matter how we divvy up the roles, one of us is always one, the other is always the other, until we trade again.

Or we can try to work out that delicate balance of sharing the responsibilities. That's hardest of all. Good luck.

Men hunt. Women shop. It's a simple -- too simple, of course -- truism. But kind of true, too.